Investing in Children: Seen and Heard

We were delighted to welcome the child-led history project Seen and Heard, run by Investing in Children, to the Children's History Society conference at Newcastle University last July.

Robert Johnson from Investing in Children explains:

The Investing in Children Seen and Heard Group were awarded a grant by The National Lottery Heritage Fund in 2022 to bring to the forefront children’s history across County Durham, as told by young people and undertaken during their project for the last two years.  

The IiC Seen and Heard Group is facilitated by Investing in Children. A few years back, young people that Investing in Children were working with identified a lack of representation of children and young people in historical narratives and wanted to address this personally. Therefore, we applied for funding for this through the Heritage Fund and the Seen and Heard project was born. 

The young people in the group (aged 7 to 15yrs) have directed the project throughout. They’ve worked incredibly hard over the last two years and have conducted a series of activities. These include:

Oral history interviews 

An online survey for people to share their memories of growing up in the North East

Outreach work with local youth clubs, 

Created an interactive workshop for schools, 

Created a fictional character to be utilised by the Locomotive Museum

Created a poem for the Big Meeting 

Worked with Jack Drum Arts to produce a play of their findings. 

The project is due to finish this autumn and the young people will be hosting an event of their findings so that their work (and their approach of doing history on their own terms) can be shared as widely as possible, with young people, local communities, the heritage sector and the academic community. They would also like to be able to celebrate their achievements. 

The Story in Durham City is one of these spaces where they will share their project, no other group in UK is doing this.

Emma a Seen and Heard group member, explained: “It’s been great, we have done workshops in schools based on what we found out from our research, 100% of children told us they learned about history better, because they learned about people their age, which shows everyone what we are doing is important and people especially children like us, should learn more about children’s history”.   

Tom another member of the group, expressed: “We have even made fictional character, one is called Peter The Railway Boy, after a real person, which the Locomotive museum is going develop further so more children learn about children when they leave this museum, which is what we wanted to change as a group”.  

L: oral history interviews taking place; R: Seen and Heard school workshop